August 21, 2017

by Kevin Dawson

It’s becoming a go-to strategy for the LGBT lobby:

Step 1: Identify a candidate (likely a Republican) who stands “against LGBT people.”Step 2: Pour a ton of money into the race in favor of the LGBT-friendly (likely Democrat) candidate.Step 2a: Watch as the Republican Party establishment stays out of the election in order to avoid being called “anti-gay.”Step 3: Crush the conservative candidate with the power of a massive campaign fund and pretend it’s because of their “bigoted” views.

This was exactly the playbook used, for example, in North Carolina, where Democrats and their moneyed allies dumped tons of cash to defeat incumbent GOP Gov. Pat McCrory and then acted as if HB2, the state’s “bathroom bill,” was the cause of his downfall.

Now, we may be seeing a replay of this strategy in Virginia, where Democrat Danica Roem is challenging incumbent Republican Robert Marshall for his seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. Although Marshall has represented the district for 25 years and ought to stand as the favorite, Roem has raised over $100,000 from out-of-state donors, demolishing Marshall’s relatively paltry $15,000 total.

Why all the interest in this race? Roem is a transgender woman, and the pro-LGBT Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund believes that helping “elect the first openly transgender candidate for a state legislature” merits getting involved.

As in North Carolina, the Left is clearly attempting to tie the Republican candidate’s “anti-LGBT” views with every other criticism of him as a candidate. Consider this section of a video interview by The Washington Post with the transgender candidate Roem:

REPORTER: She says he [Marshall] misgendered her to the Washington Post.

ROEM: I had to go through a lot in my transition to get where I am now, and I think that when you are a delegate you need to respect your constituents, and respecting your transgender constituents means that you acknowledge them for the gender they are.

REPORTER: How confident are you that Delegate Marshall would get this [traffic issue] done?

ROEM: He has not gotten it done, he can’t get it done, and he will not get it done.

The whole interview follows this track. Essentially the message is “because Delegate Marshall is against LGBT issues, he has failed to fix the traffic problem” and presumably other issues facing the Prince William community. This interview is a small sample of what will be the larger strategy that we will see unfold against Marshall in the race.

Conservatives must not let what happened to McCrory to happen again in Prince William County, Va., or in any race. There’s a present need here to get involved and bring to bear some competitive political spending that will allow Marshall — and other conservative candidates — to counter the message of the LGBT lobby. Otherwise, it is very possible that this race will become just the latest political victory in the long march of radical Left.